I remember an interview that Derrida gave (I think it was in the film, Ghost-Dance​), where Derrida was asked whether or not he believed in ghosts. And, naturally, in his very "Derrida" sort of way, he wrestled with the question along multiple axes, (subjectivity, cinema, etc.) and ultimately said yes. This is not surprising given his project of the deconstruction of "presence" and his many, many texts and comments on concepts such as "the trace" and "cinders" and ultimately, "specters." 

Yesterday, January 21, 2023, marks the second anniversary of the death of my father. For reasons I can't quite comprehend, losing my father has been infinitely more impactful than losing my mother. "Impactful" is likely not the appropriate term, because the night I learned that my mother had died, I fell to the floor and let out a cry the likes of which I've never heard from a human being before or since. "Enduring" is probably the better term. The death of my mother hit me hard, but the brunt of the impact had diminished a great deal within six months or so. By that time, the dreams of my mother, once so frequent, had lessened to a few times a month. ...

It's been a while since I've done one of these things, and since I'm still technically on break, and not completely overwhelmed with other things to do, I decided to elaborate a little bit on my Twitter post from yesterday. The tweet you see here appeared on my timeline somehow, though I don't follow the person who posted it. I posted a response to this tweet, with the following words... 

I suppose a lot of people have that one uncle, the one whose eyes would light up whenever they'd see you, who always had candy or snacks or some other contraband ready to give you whenever Mom wasn't looking, who could never stay mad at you for very long, no matter how damn annoying you might be. For me, that person was my uncle Mark. 

Many of my earliest memories include him. My parents divorced when I was a baby (just after my first birthday), and after that, and after a short sojourn of sleeping in her car and on friends' couches, my mom quickly remarried, to an abusive alcoholic who regularly beat her, more than once to the point of hospitalization. From there, she bounced from one guy's apartment to the next, and I with her, until we finally landed at my grandmother's lakeside mobile home, when I was three years old. In that trailer lived my grandmother and grandfather (husband #4 for Grandma), my aunt Carla, my uncle Mark, and then, my mother and me. How in the fuck we all managed to fit into that tiny trailer, I'll never know. But my close bond with uncle Mark was forged in those early days. It was an uncharacteristically happy period of my life, despite (or perhaps, in part, because of) the cramped living quarters. My grandpa regularly took me boating, and the trailer park was actually a fairly tight-knit little community, where everyone knew everyone else. I have vague memories of a few wild parties, at which I was not supposed to be present, but was, thanks to uncle Mark. "Memories" might be a bit strong... more like, flashes of images, three or four frames from a film strip here and there, people dancing, whispers of color, etc. But my uncle Mark was always showing me off, and he was always happy; and his happiness was contagious. 

Just shy of my fourth birthday, my mom got her very own place for the first time. It was a run-down old hair salon that had been converted into a two-unit apartment. The place was a dump, but it was ours. (It has since been torn down). One thing that I remember about that tiny apartment was that the living room was extremely small (it had been the waiting room when it was a hair salon, so it was basically wide enough to hold a single row of chairs), and there was only one bedroom. The couch in our living room left only a narrow walkway through it. My mother, at the time determined to be the best mom in the world (and she indeed was for a short while in my life), slept every night on the rickety old couch, giving the bedroom to me, though she would sometimes crawl into bed with me when it was storming. (My mom was always terrified of storms, and even as a child, I was not afraid of them). My uncle Mark visited us quite often in our tiny, shithole apartment. Those too were good days. 

In the coming years, my mom would enter her third marriage, a relatively stable one for a stint. And uncle Mark would assume something of a superhero status in my eyes. He was charming, handsome, funny, cool, and confident, with just a dash of shyness. And somehow, I was always the recipient of his "coolness." Uncle Mark gave me my first sip of beer when I was seven years old. He taught me that sunglasses were cool. He was the person who taught me to drive, in his $300 piece of shit pickup truck, that had been a baby shit green color, but the previous owner had attempted to paint black, with a brush, no less, and had clearly run out of black paint midway through, so that much of the baby shit green was still visible. I was driving this hideous monstrosity on a rural gravel road, and uncle Mark's quip that I was going to ruin his pretty paintjob was precisely the thing I needed to make me laugh and calm my nerves. He taught me to ride a motorcycle and instilled in me a lifelong love for motorcycles. In fact, the motorcycle I now have is a Yamaha that I sold to uncle Mark when my son was born. Uncle Mark also gave me my first condoms and one of my first real "sex talks." He was everything "cool" a boy could hope for in an adult male figure. Just bad enough to be cool, but good enough to love with all of his heart. The perfectly human blend of sinner and saint.

Around the time I was graduating from Eastern Illinois University (2004), my uncle Mark suffered a serious ear infection, which eventually found its way into his brain. He ultimately had to undergo surgery to have the infection removed, and in so doing, he suffered damage to his brain that, though not extensive, was significant enough to leave him with a mood disorder that would plague him for the remainder of his life. Soon, my uncle, seeking solitude, bought a mobile home and moved to the old family farm. This had been my grandfather's farm, where my mother had grown up; and on its perimeter was a small plot of land where my mom and dad had lived in a mobile home shortly after they were married, and where I had spent the first year of my life. (Incidentally, it was this mobile home out of which my grandfather evicted my mom and me, in the middle of a summer night, when he discovered that my mom had divorced my dad--content for a later blog post, perhaps). My uncle Mark situated his own mobile home on the very same little plot of land where my parents' trailer had once sat. 

Over the next few years, doctors tried prescribing several different antidepressants, but my uncle's rebellious nature, (and his intolerance for the erectile dysfunction that the meds caused him) kept him from faithfully adhering to his medicinal regimen. And as anyone on antidepressants knows, wavering in one's fidelity to their medicinal regimen can seriously fuck with a person's brain. My uncle was no exception, and over the next few years, he wrestled with more and less severe bouts of depression. Despite his good humor and larger-than-life bravado, on the morning of April 21, 2008, my uncle took a 12-gauge shotgun, walked into the field just behind the spot where I had spent my first year of life, sat in a lawn chair, and shot himself point blank in the chest. He was still barely clinging to life when the EMTs arrived, and according to them, my uncle's last words were, "Please, just let me go." 

It would be impossible to state how deeply his suicide hit me. If I'm being honest, I think it was really the first death that absolutely decimated me emotionally. Sure, I had lost all of my grandparents by this time, and sure, each death was sad, but none so sad as losing uncle Mark. No one had ever been so integral to my life, so instrumental in my maturation, as uncle Mark. No one had occupied so central a role throughout the entirety of my life, as uncle Mark. His death was the first that literally brought me to my knees in that wave of shock that paralyzes a person when someone who is so extraordinary a part of them dies. Moreover, it was so devastating because it was so shocking. When your grandmother drinks nothing but whiskey, or your grandfather eats his cigars, you kind of expect that their days are numbered. Uncle Mark was only two years older than I am now when he died, and though I knew he had been dealing with depression, I had no idea just how severe it was. I think I deluded myself into believing that his inherent optimism and good humor would ultimately triumph over the darkness. Call it ignorance, I suppose. I didn't understand how mental illness works.  

I offer this reflection primarily because I realized the other day that I had passed the April 21 anniversary, and that, for the first time since his death, I didn't take notice. That may be a good thing, as it may signal that the scar has mostly healed. Or it may be a factor of my own mental health struggles. Either way, the realization of having passed the anniversary brought on a wave of sadness and guilt, and it felt right to remember him. As so many of my monumental 'firsts' were with uncle Mark, I suppose it's only fitting that uncle Mark would also be the first of many eulogies that I would be asked to do for family members in the coming years (including my mom and dad). I'm not a particularly religious person anymore, and yet, I also understand that eulogies are not just for the speaker, but for the loved ones, many of whom want to believe that they will see their loved ones again. So I ended the eulogy in a way that was fitting to the character of uncle Mark, who was, and will always be in my memory, the perfect blend of sinner and saint. I ended with two quotes, one from Paul's letter to the church in Rome, and one a line from an Ozzy Osbourne song. It is with these two quotes that I end this reflection. 

Romans 8, verses 24 & 25: "For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it."

"Goodbye to romance, goodbye to friends. Goodbye to all the best. I guess that we’ll meet, we'll meet in the end."

Anyone who grew up under the cruel regime of a narcissistic abuser will instantly recognize the substance of this topic. It has to do with the way in which narcissistic abusers tend to make everything about themselves, even and perhaps especially events that are objectively and incontrovertibly not about themselves. For instance, on my 18th birthday, my mother wrote me a letter telling me that, because I was such a selfish person, she wasn't going to give me a gift. A few days after my 18th birthday, when my father announced that he was no longer paying child support, my mother screamed at me that we were going to lose our house, and that it was all my fault. (This was the first time I ever seriously considered suicide). She almost didn't come to my wedding, and she spent most of our engagement torturing me with cruel head games, saying at multiple points that she never wanted to speak to me again, and once threatening to call the police if I ever again stepped foot on her property. She did not attend my PhD graduation ceremony. Etc. As a result, these events are forever marked by the cruel scars of parental spite, which, I suspect, was exactly what she wanted. Ruining an event is one way of imposing oneself indelibly into the memory associated with the event. 

Last week I was reminded of this, as my beautiful little niece celebrated her 7th birthday. My niece is, for better and for worse (as I like to remind my sister constantly), the spittin' image of my baby sister when she was a little girl. Smart as hell, clever, beautiful long, sandy blond hair, sparkling eyes, a smile that lets you know she knows more than you do, she loves to dance, and knows how to get her way. 

She was born in April of 2015. Her birth marked the beginning of my mother's downward spiral and eventual death. My sister and I were somewhat estranged at the time of my niece's birth, thanks to years of manipulation on the part of my mother. My mother would regularly call me and tell me what a disappointment I was as a son, telling me at the same time what a wonderful daughter my sister was... how loyal she was, how much she loved her mother, etc. What I didn't realize was that my mother was also doing the same thing, in reverse, to my sister. I had grown pretty numb to my mother's abuse by that time, but my sister hated me as a result of all the wedges my mother drove between us. What this meant was that, at the time of my niece's birth, I wasn't privy to the details of what was happening from my sister's perspective, and while I knew that my mother's account was unreliable, I had nothing else with which to fill in the blanks. 

My sister had made a plan with my mother for when she went into labor. They would stop by my mother's house, drop off my nephew (who was just barely 2 at the time), and head to the hospital. So, when my sister went into labor, that's exactly what they did. They drove my nephew to my mother's house, left him with my mother and stepfather, and went to the hospital. At that time, my sister told my mom she would text her when it was close to time to deliver. In yet another example of the pernicious effects of narcissism, my sister, recognizing that my mother would inevitably make a scene at the hospital if she had to wait in the waiting room for long, concluded that it would be better for all involved if my mom arrived closer to the actual delivery time. So instead of thinking only about her own wellbeing (as a delivering mother should be), she was also stressing about how to negotiate the childish antics of my mother. But then, my brother-in-law's family showed up at the hospital immediately, and began (innocently) chronicling the experience on Facebook. My mother, seeing this, interpreted it as my sister's doing (it wasn't), the idea being that my sister didn't want my mother there, but she did want her mother-in-law there. And my mother decided to dive into a bottle of vodka to indulge her loathsome self-pity. Shortly after this, my sister texted my mother and asked her to come to the hospital. But my mom, now completely blitzed, (with my nephew in her care, no less), was too mired in drunken self-pity to go to the hospital. And she didn't respond to my sister's text. My sister delivered her baby girl without her mother present to celebrate the occasion with her. Furthermore, our mother didn't go to the hospital the next day to see my sister or my niece, nor did she call or text. My sister was released from the hospital that afternoon, and went to my mother's house to collect my nephew, discovering my mother completely blitzed and incoherent. This was, understandably, the last straw for my sister. She told my mother that unless and until she began to respect some basic boundaries about her drinking, the two of them could not have a relationship. 

This was not the story that I got from my mother. On my mother's account, my sister had uninvited her to the hospital, invited her in-laws, and then the next day, inexplicably shown up angry,  grabbed her son, and sped away, never to be heard from again. This was the moment that my mother began her long game of self-destruction. For years... well, really, for most of our lives, our mother had this guilt formula wherein she would treat us like pieces of garbage, then when we would be upset with her, she would cryptically allude to vague "health issues", saying that someday soon, she would be dead, and then we'd really be sorry. By the time our mother died, she'd been dying for thirty years. But when my sister finally put up that wall, my mother decided to implement her self-destruction as a concrete strategy. She began drinking, constantly. By late spring, she was telling me, in incoherent telephone conversations, that she was having difficulty walking. When I would encourage her to see a doctor, she would tell me that she wasn't "rich," like I, apparently, was. I chalked it up to her dramatic posturing, (which had been a staple of her abuse for decades). By the summertime, she was in a wheelchair. Again, I chalked this up to her dramatic posturing, as there were indications that she was, in fact, walking, when people weren't around. Through this whole affair, she would tell me that my sister wouldn't have anything to do with her, and, according to my mother, "she just keeps saying, 'you don't get it.'" I'd ask, "don't get what, Mom?" and she would claim not to know, repeating herself through the slurs of alcoholic anaesthetization. Again, being estranged from my sister at this point, I was only getting one side of the story. I encouraged my mother to ask my sister to go to family counseling together. She initially said she couldn't afford it. So I offered to pay for it (you know, because I'm so insanely rich). Then she declined on the grounds that she knew my sister would refuse to go. 

Then came my sister's wedding, in the late summer. My sister looked past her differences with me and invited me to the wedding. She also invited my mother, but as a condition, insisted that she be sober. That was apparently too much to ask, as my mother didn't attend, yet again breaking my sister's heart. I sat with her in the church, as she anxiously looked back at the doors again and again, hoping against the odds that our mother would come. She didn't. I proudly walked my sister down the aisle and gave her away. Thus began our reconciliation. 

Then came early November. My mother collapsed, and was taken to the hospital. It was only then that I realized the depths of her self-destruction, and that her posturing was only partly feigned. Through conversations with the attending physician, I realized that what my mother had begun doing when my sister put her foot down about her drinking was, she began drinking heavily, constantly, non-stop. Her body reacted by not allowing her to keep any food down. She responded by intensifying her drinking and cutting her eating to the bare minimum, a tomato here, a slice of bread there. And most of it, her body would immediately expel. As a result, her potassium levels plummeted. It was their precipitous decline that had weakened her limbs and deadened her extremities to the point that she required additional assistance with ambulation. But rather than recognizing this as her body's cry for help, my mother had merely interpreted it as a sign that her strategy was working. Her health really was declining, and sooner or later, we'd have to come to her rescue and be at her mercy. We'd have to see what awful and ungrateful children we'd been. So she'd doubled down. 

In the hospital, my mother was, naturally, insufferable. She screamed constantly at the doctors and the nurses, she tried to claw them, to the point that she had to be physically restrained to the bed. So she writhed like a wild animal, and ripped her IVs out with her teeth. After 48 hours, the doctors, unable to subdue her any further, and having staved off the absolute worst for the time being, released her into the care of my stepfather. 

Over the course of that weekend, my sister and I reconnected. We talked openly and honestly like we hadn't done in over a decade. I learned about the extent of my mother's drinking, how it had been going on for years, how she had hidden it from us (or tried to anyway). I learned the story about my niece's birth, my mother's tantrum, her drunken dereliction of grandparental duty regarding my nephew, and I learned exactly what it was that my sister had demanded of her, that had kicked off this whole degradation. My sister, blaming herself, said that it was all her fault that our mother was in this condition. That she shouldn't have "cut our mother off" that way. And that she was planning to basically drop the walls and unconditionally let our mother back in. I made a decision and recommendation that, in hindsight, set off a chain of events that led to our mother's death. I told my sister that she was absolutely in the right with her ultimatums. That love, even the love of a parent, is never obligatory. That she is a mom, and that, first and foremost, her obligations are to the protection of the wellbeing of her children. That there is absolutely nothing wrong, and on the contrary, that it is in everyone's best interest that there be clear and established boundaries for our mother's behavior. I encouraged her to approach a reconciliation with our mother, if at all, with the utmost caution. That she approach her first by herself, and, if anything, say that she wanted to reestablish a relationship, but that the only way that they could do that would be if my mother would agree to some ground rules, all involving abstention from drinking when she and the kids were around, and of course, the uncompromising cessation of all abusive belittlement of her. That crossing either of those lines would result in another break in communications between them. My sister followed this advice to the letter. 

Our mother refused. At this moment, she realized that her plan had failed. She had gotten exactly what she wanted in terms of the decaying of her physical wellbeing to the point that she had to be hospitalized. However, it didn't have the desired effect on my sister or me. We didn't collapse into a state of abject groveling, there was no "come to Jesus" moment where we were suddenly overwhelmed with shame at our ingratitude as her offspring. Her wager unsuccessful, she immediately resumed the practices that had put her in the hospital. One month later, she was dead. 

At her funeral, my sister and I stood together at the coffin, looking upon her body. All the mortician's expertise and efforts were unable to restore to my mother the customary look of peace on the face of the dead. Her eyelids, her mouth, her cheeks, even her gnarled fingers, all bore witness to the years of resentment, spite, self-loathing, self-pity, and substance abuse that had slowly gotten the best of our mother. My sister cried, and through her sobs, she kissed our mother's forehead and said, "I'm so sorry, Mommy." Even now, I can still see her tears saturating our mother's forehead, tears mixed with saliva, both uncontrollably flowing forth from a soul in agony, racked with guilt. But I held my sister, and I assured her with absolute certainty that it was my fault, not hers, that I was the one who had advised her on how to handle the situation, and that she had merely followed my advice. I can't remember, however, whether or not I told her the truth, that even though I bore the responsibility, I wasn't sorry. That if my sister had gone to our mother and granted her wish of unconditional surrender, it would have only been a matter of time before my mother had completely destroyed my sister, and that my niece and nephew would have inevitably been recipients of the shrapnel, casualties of a unilateral emotional war. I bear that responsibility, but I would, without hesitation, do it again. 

I offer all of this as a reflection on the ways in which our abusers impose themselves into our every memory, even and especially the joyful ones. Anything that is not inherently about them, they will make about them by inscribing on our hearts a scar that will forever be associated with that joy. Last week, as we celebrated the birthday of my beautiful niece, (whom my mother never met), my heart was also revisited by the scars of the events that followed upon her birth, and the scars of my culpability in them. I offer this reflection as perhaps a small consolation to those victims of abusers who also wrestle with such gut-wrenching ambivalence over life's joyful moments: you are not alone. 

I'll begin this little reflection with an embarrassing confession: I'm a total baby when it comes to pain. My wife has reminded me of this more than once. The slightest boo boo sends me into panic mode. The pop of an ankle when walking down the stairs, a slight bump of the elbow on the arm of the chair, you know... any one of the multitudes of things that befall us all every single day, and I let out a groan or a grunt of seemingly infinite discomfort. And that's not to mention the bigger stuff. When I was in the hospital with my kidney stones, for instance, I apologized profusely to the nursing staff for being such a nuisance with my groans of pain. When I go to get a shot, there's the nervous sweating, the wincing, the turning of the head, the deep breathing, etc. But that brings me to my point. The nurse, inevitably, asks a very reasonable question: "Dude, your arms are covered in tattoos, and you can't handle a tiny little needle?" 

It's true. Both my arms, my hands, and my right calf, are all decorated, and what surface area isn't yet decorated, will be soon. A few weeks ago, I went in for ten hours (in total) of tattooing, over a two-day period. And I thought about this question a lot. How is it that I, a self-professed baby when it comes to bodily pain, can tolerate such prolonged periods of rather intense, slow, and methodical pain? One response, one that is often given by people who get tattoos, is the utilitarian response: "A few hours of pain for a lifetime of the tattoo." That makes sense, I guess. Employing a utilitarian calculus would place on one side of the scale a rather intense pain, but for a very short and concentrated duration, (followed by an irritation of relatively mild intensity for a week or so), as opposed to, on the other side, a significant pleasure spread out over the rest of one's life. And certainly, at some points in the process, the most severely painful ones, this calculus is indeed running through my head. 

But, for me at least, it's more than just a tolerance of the pain. For much of the process, I actually enjoy the pain. And I've heard from other tattoo enthusiasts that they do too. And this is the really interesting question to me. If it were a simple matter of utilitarian calculus, well... that's fairly easy peasy. But utilitarian calculus cannot explain how it is that I can actually enjoy something that I know to be painful. 

For a time, it seemed to me that the ascetic response might be a possibility. Many of the ascetic traditions emphasize the process of purifying the soul or spirit by way of the mortification of the body. In the Phaedo, Socrates suggests that by denying the body the indulgences of sex, food, and drink, we actually practice in the art of separating the soul from the body, so that when death (the final separation of the soul from the body) finally arrives, we'll have spent our lives preparing for it. A more colloquial way of expressing the ascetic route might be the principle of "mind over matter," the idea that if you simply focus your attention elsewhere than on the body, your mind can actually overpower the material and neurological impact of the steel needle, penetrating the surface of the flesh at a rate of several thousand times per minute. This is why some folks listen to music, for instance (though I never have). And again, in some of the most excruciating moments, I no doubt employ the method of trying to will the subjugation of the body.

But this response, for me, is still unsatisfactory. For the vast majority of the process, the pleasure is actually in the pain itself. And to me, this requires an almost opposite response to that of the ascetic. Specifically, the thing I think is most fascinating about the experience of being tattooed is precisely the inability to overpower the body with the mind - the incapacity to focus the mind on anything else other than the needle in the flesh. Contrary to the ascetic view that tattooing enables a separation of the mind or the spirit from the body, tattooing is an eminently material practice, through and through - steel and ink, penetrating flesh, leaving a material work of art upon the body for the remainder of the bearer's life. The very soul of tattooing is in the body itself. The beautiful thing about the pain is the way that it enables, or even necessitates, what Zen practitioners refer to as the practice of mindfulness. In a scene in David Fincher's Fight Club, Tyler pours the flaked lye onto the saliva-soaked kiss on the back of the narrator's hand, holding him captive at the mercy of an increasingly severe chemical burn, and the narrator attempts to retreat into his cave, the safe space in his mind. Tyler slaps him back to the present, insisting that he not lose this moment, that he stay immersed in it, that he acknowledge this pain as his pain. 

The Zen practice of mindfulness focuses on being truly and fully present, in this moment. The demands of modern life, not to mention the ubiquitous temptations of technology, constantly lure our attention from the here and now, in such a way that we half-drift through the vast majority of our lives. I'm doing the dishes, but really I'm fantasizing about an alternate lifeline in which I'm a rock star, or I'm thinking about what classes I want to teach next semester, or a paper that I'm going to write for a conference next fall. Or I'm interpreting the act of doing the dishes--"Wow, there are a lot of dishes." "I'm really tired of being the only one who does the dishes." Etc. I'm watching a show with my family, but really I'm wondering if my Dean has read the email I sent her, or if my students have turned in their exams in Moodle, or if I really understand this point in Foucault that I'm going to talk about in class tomorrow. I'm listening to a lecture, but really I'm checking Twitter, and I'm not even really doing that, because I'm passively thinking at the same time about a chapter that's due in two months. So much of our lives are only half-lived, if that. The practice of mindfulness is dedicated to disciplining the mind, clearing the noise, so as to attain a lucidity and a clarity, the ability (more difficult than it sounds) to focus one's attention completely on one's present experience. 

So, to return to this question of the tattoo, the ascetic response seems to me inadequate or, at the very least, incomplete. The pleasure in undergoing the tattoo needle lies not in the separation of the mind from the body, (which, for me at least, is impossible for most of the process), but rather, in the way that it activates the power of the mind in the entirely opposite direction--not away from the body, but in a full and inescapable immersion in the bodily moment. Don't misunderstand me... this incapacity of the mind (to focus anywhere else) is still an acknowledgment of a certain mental power. Indeed, it's a power that all too often eludes us: the power of the mind to be fully and completely one with the body, the power to fully incorporate the material temporality that the body is undergoing, the power to truly experience what one is experiencing, to live what is so typically only half-lived. "I ink, therefore I am." 

Aside from my high school girlfriend, (whom I later married), there were two deeply significant friendships in my middle and high school years, friendships that were truly formative. The first was Barry, who became my friend in 7th grade. As it is for many, the beginning of middle school was an awful transition for me. And on top of all the standard transitional elements, I was also dealing with the fact that my mother had just gone through her third divorce, from the man who had been my *father* for much of my life, and had immediately begun a serious relationship with a new man. Like me, Barry came from a relatively low-income background, and had cultivated a perverse sense of humor as a way of coping with the struggles of everyday life. Barry was goofy, funny, clever, intelligent, and sensitive. We liked the same music, watched the same movies, ran in the same circles, and Barry could make me laugh like no one else. We were best friends for about three years. That friendship began to deteriorate in my freshman year of high school, when it came to light that Barry had stolen some high-value baseball cards from me. We lost contact in the following summer, right around the time that I began dating my future wife. Then, in our senior year, at a New Year's Day party in fact, Barry accidentally shot himself in the head with a 9mm pistol he carried around with him at all times. He survived, but was minimally conscious and completely paralyzed until the end of his life, which came a few years ago. 

The second friend was Pat. Our friendship began, as most do, purely by chance. Pat was two years younger than I was, and I knew him tangentially through his brother, Joel, who was in JROTC with me. I walked into the school cafeteria one January day looking for someone in that friend circle (I no longer remember who) to join me for lunch. That person wasn't there, but Pat was, and he cheerfully volunteered to go. We had so much fun in that hour window, and the next day, spotting me in the hall, he mentioned going again. By the end of that week, a routine had formed, one that lasted for the remainder of my senior year. 

Pat was a small guy, small in stature and in build. But he was huge in personality. He was one of the most affable, jovial, lovable people I've ever known in my life. He was the poster child for the 90s hippyish nerd, typically sporting tattered flannel shirts worn loosely and open over a T-shirt bearing the name of either a 60s group like the Doors (our shared favorite band at the time), or a 90s grunge band like Nirvana or Pearl Jam. He wore glasses and black combat boots, and in the cold weather wore a Vietnam-era military jacket that I can only assume he bought in a thrift store. I envied him his shaggy, chin-length hair, always clean but also always haphazardly hanging just in his eyes and in brown waves to the side of his head. (Thanks to JROTC, I had to keep my hair short). Hell, to be honest, I envied the way he could pull off the "I don't care how I look" look, as it never seemed to work for me. I clicked with Pat in a way that I have never really clicked with any other male friend in my life.

Our favorite haunt for lunch was McHugh's restaurant, a fast food "chain" with a few restaurants in our county. They had the best chili cheese dogs I've ever had. We'd typically grab our food, go to my house and scarf it down, then kill the rest of our lunch by cruising around the neighborhoods near the high school, blaring the Doors and trying not to attract the attention of the police. A few weeks after our lunch ritual began, Pat invited me to his house for the first time, to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show (the first time I'd ever seen it). Joel made cheeseburgers, their mom made Rotel dip, and we watched the film, with Joel and Pat singing along to every song. 

After this, our friendship was no longer confined to school lunch hours. We began to hang out together just about every day that one of us wasn't working. We'd watch movies, hang out at one of our houses listening to music, eat more calories in a meal than I eat now in a week (oh, to have the body of a young man again). And the passage of time brought warmer weather. Spring turned to summer, and I graduated. And one of our favorite things to do... we'd take the sunroof out of my car (I had an '81 Toyota Tercel hatchback that had been wrecked when I bought it for $300... it was ugly as shit, but the stereo worked and so did the sunroof). Then we'd drive around town, with the windows down, stereo BLARING, and Pat, standing up out of my sunroof howling and screaming at the top of his lungs. How I managed to never run into the cops... 

But some of the most formative experiences were our walks. Pat and I would take walks, sometimes hours long, and at all hours of the day and night, sometimes until 1 or 2 in the morning. It was with Pat that I had some of my first deeply philosophical conversations, talks in which I began to question the religious faith that I had grown up with, the judgmental, sin-based morality with which I was raised, the existence of God, and so on. Pat was one of the most thoughtful, introspective, intelligent people I've ever met.  I have no doubt that these conversations were integral to the path that brought me to where I am today. 

Summer turned to fall, and fall brought transition. Pat returned to school, and I, a recent high school graduate, began working full-time. Pat and I tried to maintain our friendship, but the time just began to come between us. With me no longer at the high school, Pat formed a new circle of friends who began to occupy his time. And I had very little free time to spare anyway, given that I was working so much. One Friday night, Pat asked me to go with him to a high school bonfire party outside of town. So I went. But I felt completely awkward and out of place. Part of it had to do with being at a huge party (I've never been very good in those contexts, for some reason), but the bigger part of my discomfort was related to the fact that I was now, technically, a full-fledged "adult" at a party with people who were 15 and 16 years old, and most of whom were absolutely wasted and/or tripping balls. I stayed for maybe a half hour, before I made up some excuse and left. 

After that evening, Pat and I completely lost touch. There was no animosity on either part. It was just one of those typical dwindlings of a relationship that happen in life. I soon moved in with my girlfriend, changed jobs, got married, and bought a house. And I never heard from Pat again. A few years later, working in a print factory (where I worked for nine of my adult years), I knew a woman who, through degrees of separation, was familiar with Pat. She told me that he had recently joined the navy, and was home from basic training for a short while before shipping out. 

Over the years, I've tried a few times to track him down. A lazy Google search here or there, for instance. Then a few months ago, my wife became Facebook friends with his brother, Joel. Every once in a while, I'd send a message to Joel through my wife, and he would return the favor. In October, I thought, "One of these days, I'm gonna have her ask Joel for Pat's contact information," thinking that he and I could finally reconnect after all these years. But of course, the busyness of the semester, writing projects, my daughter's hospitalization, etc. "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow..." 

Just before Christmas, Pat suffered a completely unexpected and surprisingly severe stroke. His doctors expected him to recover, though he was going to have to learn to do some basic things all over again. At this point, I began looking forward to his recovery, as I intended to definitely try to reach him after such a harrowing experience. Then last week, Pat suffered a sudden heart attack, followed immediately by a seizure that rendered him brain dead. The next day, his family turned off his life support system, and Pat died. 

I've spent the past several days trying to process his passing, and how to mourn him. I'm, honestly, not sure why it has affected me as deeply as it has - the passing of someone I was close to for eight months, twenty-eight years ago. Maybe it's because throughout most of my life, I've had so very few close relationships that were not toxic in some way or other, and Pat was definitely one of the non-toxic friendships. Maybe it's because our friendship, though brief, left such an indelible mark on me (to this day, I still wear flannels and combat boots, and that's because of Pat). Maybe it's because I'm at that point in my life when I'm taking stock of who I am, where I've come from, and what the rest of my life might look like, and the death of this formative world is like losing a part of me. Maybe it's anger at myself for not doing more to reach out to him when he was still alive. It's an indescribable feeling. Though you've lost touch with someone for almost three decades, there's a security or a comfort in knowing that they're still out there somewhere, still living their life, that that person who brought such meaning to your life for a time is still going on, that the path from that fork continues even if in a different direction. There's always the hope that maybe some day, the paths will intersect again. Until there isn't. There's a strange solitude in knowing that the last of your closest childhood friends has died. 

If I could speak to Pat one last time, I would thank him for the time we spent together, however brief. I would let him know what a meaningful impact he had on my life, how he got me through some incredibly difficult family shit, how much he mattered to me, how much he inspired me, how he challenged me in all the best ways, how much I thought about him over the years, and how much I loved him. I hope he knew that, and I regret intensely that I never told him. For now, quoting Derrida, "I'm going to have to wander all alone in that long discussion that we should have had together." 

Adieu, my friend. Adieu, ​Patrick.

What COVID has taught me is that if there ever were an invasion of earth by extra-terrestrials, there'd be no glorious Kumbaya, à la Independence Day or the V series. No, friends, we'd be completely fucked. Republicans would be denying that there were an alien invasion, even as the planet was being destroyed, while simultaneously cashing in by marketing mystical, alien-deterring talismans like, say, planks from the recently discovered remnants of Noah's ark. Meanwhile, Democrats would be doing nothing other than publicly blaming Republicans for the invasion. And of course, this would all be nothing more than distraction while the capitalist class was preparing its own spaceships for departure. 

I know I am hardly the first to feel this, but Christmas is an intensely bittersweet holiday for me. For some unknown reason, it always has been, even as a child. I am actually a sucker for holiday movies, specials, and music. Not to mention eggnog, Christmas treats, gift exchanges, and my mother's cherry delight. I'm one of the people who insist that Lethal Weapon and Die Hard are Christmas movies, if for no other reason than to have a few more kickass movies to associate with the Christmas season. And I love it when a more recent film is able to captivate and become a modern classic, such as Elf or Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas. 

But ever since I was a child, there has always been something wistful about this holiday as well. And again, I know I'm not the only one. You can hear it in much of the Christmas music, a heaviness. And ever the philosopher, I cannot help but wonder, Why is that? 

In my own life, I think it has something to do with my sense of loneliness as a child. My parents separated when I was a baby, and both quickly moved on to other spouses, with my dad becoming a father again before my third birthday. My childhood at my father's was not a particularly happy one. And at my mother's, it was not a stable one, as we bounced from place to place, and from husband to boyfriend and boyfriend to husband, several times before I reached the age of five. Some of my earliest Christmas memories are of a sense of regret that I had never really experienced a Christmas with a family proper. I've always felt like a person on the outside, like I've never really "fit in" anywhere. 

But I'm not the only one, and I know this. Why? Maybe it's because the Christmas holiday is a clear sign that the year is ending. Perhaps this sense of imminent conclusion hearkens to a sense of finality that hits a little too close to home and reminds us of our own mortality? Maybe it's because, for this one day of the year, we gather together in large groups for celebration and cheer; and as soon as the celebration is over, we return to our largely isolated and atomized lives, preparing ourselves for the year to come. When I was a child, Christmas was the one holiday that the family came to our house. Thanksgiving was spent at my Aunt Fern's. New Year's Day and Easter were spent at my Uncle Mike's. Christmas was the holiday the family spent at my house. Everyone would come over, gifts were exchanged, Mom's cherry delight was devoured, laughs were shared, countless f-bombs were dropped. Then, everyone went home, and I was alone again, surrounded by the debris of our avarice and gluttony. Maybe the melancholy has something to do with the sense of fleetingness pertaining to this joy, a momentary flash of communion before our return to relative solitude. 

There were all the standard holiday sadnesses, of course. The first Christmas after my mom and stepdad, (who had been something like a father to me), divorced. The first Christmas after my grandpa died, when my grandma stood at the sink crying and unable to move. The Christmas when my Uncle Mark couldn't join us because he had been drinking all day and was too drunk to drive, so he stayed in his trailer in the middle of nowhere by himself. There was the years-long decline of my mom's mental health, as she slipped further and further into alcoholism and depression. I don't remember exactly when it was, but at some point, Christmas dinner at Mom's was poorly attended, mostly by the other family drunks. 

Now, as an adult who is statistically past the middle of his life, this holiday is bookended by the anniversaries of the deaths of my parents, with my mother's falling on December 10, and my father's on January 21. Christmas celebrations are now haunted by their absences. Christmas Eve, for instance, was the day that we always did presents at my dad's... it was sort of like our Christmas day. When my father was still alive, I would always text him on this day with a "Happy Christmas Eve" message. I'm not sure he ever understood the significance of it for me. 

And yet, none of this completely encapsulates the sadness of the holiday for me. I suspect that it is all of these things and none of them, for all of us who celebrate this day. That there is something about the intensity of the celebratory spirit and the fervor that also cannot but remind us of who and what we've lost, the relationships broken by time, by anger and pain, or by death. The impending conclusion of the year, the cold and darkness of the season, the subtle evanescence of twinkling colored lights, barely illuminating the darkness of our living rooms. Even in the midst of the roaring fires, the cheerful carols, the time with loved ones, religious observances, delicious meals, nostalgic films, and so on, there remain these cinders. 

I do not mean to be morose. Not at all. I send this reflection into the world, primarily because once more it is Christmas Eve, once more I am about to share laughs with my wife and my children, whom I love more than my own life, and yet, once more, I sit here on the bed, listening to Elvis's "Blue Christmas," and crying quietly to myself. And I suspect strongly that I'm not the only one. Christmas hugs to all of you.

My brother, Joe, and his girlfriend, Jacque, decided to go off the grid for a while. They bought an Econoline van, converted the inside to a livable space, complete with a built-in bed with storage underneath and storage compartments in the upper part of the van. They sold their home, quit their jobs, took their two cats, and went on the road. They're traveling hither and yon, picking up work in various agricultural environments, staying in campgrounds, etc. They're in their mid 20's, and his reasoning was that, "If I don't do it now, I feel like I never will." 

I'm probably the only person in my family who's actually proud of him for it. I'm annoyed by that fact, but I'm even more annoyed by the reaction I get from others when I tell them about his choice. It's the same, eyebrow-raised, disdainful, judgmental response, the expression of exasperated disbelief. I guess I can't say that I'm surprised by the typical reactions; but it was a reminder of how deeply we are acculturated to the ideology of capitalism, that, unless one lives in one place, pays rent or a mortgage, puts down permanent roots, and sells their souls to a corporate master, agreeing to punch a clock for five to six days a week, their lives make no sense. 

​I almost envy my brother his courage. 

If I am not mistaken, this is the first new work of Deleuze to be released since 2007's Two Regimes of Madness. I can hardly contain my excitement at its release. 320 pages of previously unreleased material! In addition to a selection of Deleuze's letters, the work contains a number of interviews, notes for a course on Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion ​that he apparently intended to publish, some of Deleuze's drawings, and the essays from Deleuze's youth.